Tuesday, August 17, 2010

As I got more into writing short stories and poetry, I found the pain in my soul slowly easing away. I lived in my own fantasy world, built up my reputation as a great writer, and receive a numbers of invitations to write for special edition magazines. It was an honor which shaped and sharpened my self-image.

For the first time in my life, I started to like myself a bit, and valued my own self-worth. It was a feeling of self-acceptance also, and knowing that I was the way God made me. Nothing I could do to change that! However, deep down inside I wanted so badly to believe that he did really love me, ONCE, even though those feelings were betrayed afterward.

My life seemed to weave many crooked journeys, and faith had a hard hand on me. In the summer of 1978, my parents decided to send me to his home town so I could go to college and avoid the harsh winter. There, I would have my seminarian brother to check in on me once I've moved into the dorm. Everything was arranged, school procedures went through, and my moving date was set.

We made the long road trip down to the South, except this time my heart was numbed. There was no joy, or excitement, or anxiety to see him. He had become a "no one" to me. He was an alien thought in my head. I did, however, bring along my "memory box" with me. I wanted to hold on to that goodness and honesty about him in the summer of 1977.

My thought was on "Again, I was being sent away for my own good"!

As I mentioned earlier, the Asian's culture was weird, and our families were now connected. So I had to stay with his family until it was time for me to move into my dorm room, which was seven days away. They assigned me to his room since he was not home for another week. It was the cruelest arrangement in the history of human kind, and the arrow shot straight to my heart without aiming.

Despite my plead to stay on the floor in the living room, his mother insisted on me using the room! I was now, slept on my lover's bed, and absorbed in my vein his being once again without so much of a choice. This twisted destiny brought all the memories back, and I ached for him as though it was just yesterday.

After my family left for home, I spent time in his room alone missing them, and that was when I saw a stack of love letters laying around. They came from Vietnam, and from a young lady. Yes, I read a few of them! She loved him! She missed him! They were childhood friends and neighbors.

My heart got stabbed, and I didn't know what to think or feel. It cut through my skin like a sharp knife. The pain was excruciating, but no tears could shed .

One the day I turned 20, he came back from his New York trip...exactly a year later!